Everybody down

Thomson Reuters proprietary research shows the estimated earnings growth rate for S&P 500 index companies in the first quarter of this year to be minus 31.4 percent. As the chart below shows, all 10 sectors that comprise the index are expecting an earnings decline relative to a year earlier.

In the Globe and Mail, Brian Milner assails “the professional purveyors of doom and the opportunistic politicians who, to paraphrase an aide to U.S. President Barack Obama, consider a crisis of any kind a terrible thing to waste.” Milner warns us against “a psychological phenomenon known as the Recency Effect”: